A triumphant Rumsfeld tours liberated Baghdad

May 2 2003By Laura KingBaghdad

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, making a triumphant visit to Iraq, hailed its liberation from a "brutal, vicious regime" and promised that the United States had no intention of "owning or running" the country.

Violence erupted on Wednesday for the second time in three days in the town of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, as Mr Rumsfeld made a brief and unannounced trip to the capital, visiting symbols of Saddam's power.

He is on a week-long tour of Persian Gulf countries, consulting regional leaders and discussing planned cuts in US troop numbers in the area.

As the Defence Secretary made his flying visit to Baghdad, the leaders of five key former exile groups gathered to discuss forming a transitional Iraqi government and decide how to broaden their coalition to include groups that stayed in Iraq during Saddam's regime.

Mr Rumsfeld, guarded by black-clad special forces troops, touched down at Baghdad airport. At one of the toppled leader's palaces, he met Lieutenant-General Jay Garner, who leads the Americans' transitional civil administration. ");document.write("

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Denying he was indulging in a victory tour, he clearly savoured the chance to convene his top ground commanders and banter with cheering troops, 1000 of whom gathered in a cavernous hangar.

He also met US and Iraqi officials who are struggling to restore water, power and other essential services to the city's 5 million people.

"Let me be clear; Iraq belongs to you," Mr Rumsfeld said in a taped message to be broadcast in Baghdad on radio and television. "The coalition has no intention of owning or running Iraq."

The complexities of using combat troops to carry out what has effectively become an extremely large-scale peacekeeping mission were evident in Fallujah, a dusty town that straddles the Euphrates River about 60 kilometres west of Baghdad.

The two sides gave widely divergent accounts of Wednesday's confrontation in which US troops shot dead two Iraqi men during a protest march.

Fourteen Iraqis were shot dead in a melee that erupted between troops and demonstrators on Monday night.

Fallujah's leaders demanded that the soldiers withdraw beyond the outskirts of town.